Part 1 Dec 2024
The $2M Millisecond Linux Defaults That Cost You Money
Deep dive into vm.swappiness, THP compaction, and C-states. Kernel internals, measurements, and the design philosophy behind low-latency Linux tuning.
Library
The Library.
Structured engineering curriculums.
New Research • December 2025
42µs: How Deterministic Execution Beats Cloud Signing
A deep dive into the physics of HFT latency and why hardware isolation beats network-based signing by 3,000x.
3 min read 511 words
Linux Infrastructure Deep Dives
Curriculum • 14 Modules
Part 1 Dec 2024
The Sub-50µs Cloud Lie How We Actually Achieved Deterministic Latency on AWS
A deep dive into why cloud providers' latency claims are misleading, and the exact kernel bypass techniques we used to achieve deterministic sub-50µs RTT on c6i.metal instances.
Part 2 Dec 2024
PTP or Die Hardware Timestamping for Regulatory-Grade Time Sync
Why NTP is fundamentally broken for HFT compliance, and how we implemented IEEE 1588 PTPv2 with hardware timestamping to achieve sub-100ns accuracy on Solarflare NICs.
Part 3 Dec 2024
CPU Isolation for HFT The isolcpus Lie and What Actually Works
Why the standard 'isolcpus' kernel parameter doesn't fully isolate your critical threads, and the combination of settings required for true deterministic scheduling.
Part 4 Dec 2024
Memory Tuning for Low-Latency The THP Trap and HugePage Mastery
How Transparent Huge Pages cause unpredictable latency spikes, and the explicit HugePage reservation strategy that eliminates memory stalls.
Part 5 Dec 2024
Network Optimization Kernel Bypass and the Art of Busy Polling
How the Linux network stack adds 50µs of latency, and the interrupt coalescing, busy polling, and AF_XDP techniques that eliminate it.
Part 5 Oct 2024
I/O Schedulers Why the Kernel Reorders Your Writes
Deep dive into I/O schedulers, Direct I/O, io_uring, and AWS EBS optimization. Block layer internals for predictable storage latency.
Part 6 Nov 2024
Trading Infrastructure First Principles That Scale
Architecture decisions that determine your latency ceiling. AWS, Kubernetes, monitoring, and security patterns for crypto trading systems.
Part 7 Jan 2025
Kubernetes StatefulSets Why Trading Systems Need State
Deep dive into StatefulSets vs Deployments, pod identity, PersistentVolumes, and graceful shutdown patterns for trading infrastructure.
Part 8 Jan 2025
Trading Metrics What SRE Dashboards Miss
Fill latency, position drift, market data staleness. The SLOs that prevent losses, not just track uptime. Prometheus, Grafana, and alerting patterns.
Part 9 Dec 2024
eBPF Profiling Nanoseconds Without Adding Any
Deep dive into eBPF, bpftrace, and kernel tracing. How to measure latency at nanosecond precision without the observer effect.
Part 10 Jan 2025
Market Data Infrastructure WebSocket Patterns That Scale
Deep dive into WebSocket reliability, sequence gap detection, Kubernetes patterns, and monitoring for multi-exchange market data systems.
Part 11 Jan 2025
The Nanosecond Economy Engineering HFT Infrastructure That Prints Money
How we reduced tick-to-trade latency from 12µs to 2.8µs at a top HFT desk. FPGA feed handlers, kernel bypass, and the $50M/year cost of 1 microsecond.
Part 11 Dec 2024
Measuring Latency in the Browser A Meta Demo
The RTT badge on this site measures real latency. Here's how, using the Performance API, Vercel edge, and the same principles that apply to trading.
On-Chain Infrastructure: DeFi
Curriculum • 4 Modules
Part 1 Dec 2024
Securing $500M The Zero-Trust Wallet Architecture for Institutional DeFi
How we replaced air-gapped cold storage with a policy-driven MPC signing pipeline, achieving 15-minute deployment cycles while exceeding hardware security guarantees.
Part 2 Dec 2024
Building a Crypto Exchange on AWS The Architecture of Liquidity
Reference architecture for a high-performance crypto exchange on AWS, covering the Matching Engine (LMAX pattern), Market Data Ingest, and MPC Custody integration.
Part 3 Dec 2024
Defense in Depth Security Architecture for High-Stakes Trading
Zero Trust networking with Teleport, supply chain security with Sigstore, and real-time risk engines with Chainalysis. How to secure an exchange from the inside out.
Part 4 Jan 2025
Defense in Depth Engineering DeFi Protocols That Don't Get Hacked
The security architecture that protects $500M+ TVL protocols. Enclave signing, rate limiters, circuit breakers, and the incident response playbook.
On-Chain Infrastructure: MEV
Curriculum • 4 Modules
Part 1 Dec 2024
The 100ms Tax Why Most Block Builders Lose Before They Start
A first-principles breakdown of why infrastructure latency, simulation failure rates, and observability gaps cost block builders 40% of their margin-and how to fix it.
Part 2 Dec 2024
Antifragile MEV How We Profit When the Network Breaks
Applying Nassim Taleb's antifragility to blockchain execution infrastructure. Why reorgs are profit opportunities, multi-builder hedging is arbitrage, and chaos engineering is a competitive advantage.
Part 3 Dec 2024
The Insider Threat Securing Order Flow When Your Own Infrastructure is the Enemy
Why the biggest threat to MEV infrastructure is not external hackers-it's rogue employees, compromised builders, and your own logs. Enclave signing, OPA firewalls, and compliance logging without alpha leakage.
Part 4 Jan 2025
The 12-Second Window Engineering Blockchain Nodes for Competitive Execution
Why your Geth node is 200ms behind the network, and the exact tuning required to achieve state freshness for MEV. The physics of io_uring, NVMe namespaces, and P2P topology.
Essays & Notes
Infrastructure
42µs: How Deterministic Execution Beats Cloud Signing
December 2025